


I'll Watch Your Life in Pictures

by sunshinexprincess



Category: The Originals (TV)
Genre: F/M, Falling In Love, Klaus Mikaelson Has A Heart, slight AU
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-14
Updated: 2020-07-14
Packaged: 2021-03-05 00:08:09
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,604
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25265113
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sunshinexprincess/pseuds/sunshinexprincess
Summary: "I love you" clung to his lips like flower petals hung to their stems in a downpour, dancing between his kisses and writing itself over and over on her skin if it would only listen. There was no one he had met in this world, in his thousand years of life, that he thought deserved to hear the words more than her.
Relationships: Hayley Marshall/Klaus Mikaelson
Comments: 5
Kudos: 50





	I'll Watch Your Life in Pictures

**Author's Note:**

> Literally have been working on this for a week and I'm so excited to get it up here! I'm in love with this piece, and I hope you are too!

He was sitting at the bar when she walked in. The fifth seat down, a space she had learned he always occupied even outside the confines of Bourbon Street, with a glass of bourbon between his hands and his collar popped like a new-age Dracula. She tilted her head, smiling at the man who hadn’t yet noticed her arrival, her arms wrapped around her waist and her fingers drumming dully against the wool coat at her elbow, the small golden ring engraved with an M glinting in the dim yellow of the bar light. When Elijah had first given it to her on Christmas twelve years ago, he had claimed it stood for Marshall.

Lately, though, she had started to introduce herself as Hayley Mikaelson when anyone asked. The way their faces slipped into an amusing blend of fear and awe gave her a rush of power she had never felt; she understood now why Klaus made sure to smoothly state his full name in every fight. Relishing in the pheromones their bodies released, the smell of fear intoxicated her just like whiskey. She thought mildly that maybe she was turning into Klaus in his absence.

Or maybe- maybe- she had always been like him.  
________

He had noticed she was here since the moment she stepped inside from the hazy Italian night. It was hard not to; her scent filled his nostrils and poured into his heart, flooding him with what he assumed was nostalgia- he had never really had the sensation before until leaving her in New Orleans. He waited patiently as she watched him, scanned the room once and then tilted her head, tapped her finger nervously against her coat, smiled. He felt her, smelled her, read her like an old book he had forgotten but knew every word to when it reappeared in front of him. She smelled like coffee, and whiskey and bourbon, and a hint of his oil paints, blood and wolfish musk and then a whisper of roses and lilac, the flowers she always ordered to place around the compound by the hundreds. 

He had heard, even here in Siena, of the Hybrid called Hayley Mikaelson. She was as kind as she was cold, as generous as she was ruthless, with a smile as sweet as it was deadly. She was the very best of herself, and the very worst, it seemed, of him. He couldn’t help but feel the slightest bit proud.

He remembered she had always preferred Marshall-Kenner; the last addition he considered a slap in the face to both him and Elijah, akin to her wedding ring hanging on a chain around her neck- a wedding ring he suddenly noticed was no longer settled neatly between her collarbones. She had always liked the anonymity of Marshall; even with the Mikaelsons as her family, her lack of attachment to the name had always allowed her to just be Hayley: the woman who could calm Marcel, befriend Rebekah, inspire passion in Elijah, and make Klaus Mikaelson smile.

He wondered when that preference had changed. Most importantly, he wondered why. 

She moved across the barroom, boots clicking evenly, confidently, sliding into the seat next to him and ordering a whiskey in perfect Italian. She put a hand on the countertop, palm up and fingers light. As if to say “your move.”

He smirked. She truly was turning into him. He took her open hand, bringing it to his lips and pressing a slow kiss to the back, keeping his grip on it as they both took their drinks silently in hand. 

“You speak Italian well,” he offered. It felt like the lamest and most disappointing way to begin their conversation; he wanted nothing more that to take her into his arms, hold her close and breathe her in endlessly, stand with her there until the bar closed and then take her back to his penthouse so they could drink their way through the entirety of his bourbon selection and watch the sun rise over the city. 

“I practiced for weeks before coming here.” She blushed, and suddenly she was the Hayley he knew again, grinning over the most expensive whiskey at Rousseau’s with her eye squinted in a rare moment of laughter as he teased her about something or another that had gone on that day.

“It sounds lovely on you.”

“Thank you.” She took a sip of whiskey. “How long have you been here?” Her eyes scanned the room again, and he realized that she wasn’t interested in the decor, the aura, the locals. No, she was noting exits. Registering potential threats. Locating items she could fight with. Planning fight patterns around the furniture. 

Another one of his traits. It looked a hundred and twenty times better in her hazelnut eyes. 

“Four months.” He downed the bourbon, raising his elegant fingers to the bartender for another. “I’m moving on to Tokyo next week.” He flashed a smirk at her, the first time they had truly looked at each other. Her heart jumped to her throat. He was just as beautiful as he was exactly four months ago in Dubai, smiling at her and backlit by and endless landscape of skyscrapers. Something warm grew inside her stomach at the knowledge that he would always look this beautiful, this timeless.

“I thought you would like Italy,” he continued pensively, drawing her back to the barroom from her thoughts. “I wanted to show at least a small part of it to you before you spend your eternity discovering it yourself.” 

“I do like it.” She smiled at him assuringly, but it quickly faded. “Why are you leaving? It feels like every time I come to see you. . .”

“I leave,” he finished easily, with his eyebrows sightly raised.

“Yeah.” She was fiddling with the easy silk of her dress, her ring catching the light and flashing like a painful reminder of his brother and simultaneous fond realization that she finally and proudly considered herself a Mikaelson.

He could have told her the truth; the look in her eyes told him she already knew it. But he couldn’t bear, despite his claims to apathy, to say the words out loud, to watch her face drop into knowing and her body draw into itself the way it always did when she was hurt. She was too bold, and too beautiful, a dazzling piece of infinity draped in pink silk and shining gold at a small no-name bar in Northern Italy, to disappoint tonight. Or really, he figured, ever. 

“I invite you before I leave to show you the parts of the world that I can.” It tasted like a lie, even on his lips so used to them. She didn’t move. “All you truly know of the world is New Orleans and a small town in Virginia. I wish to remedy that.” That part, at least, was true, and it flowed more easily from his tongue to her ears hung with diamonds. 

Hayley nodded, and he allowed the relief to wash over him that she wouldn’t push it this time; that he had another four months before the question came up again, and he would have to either break her heart or lie to her in a futile attempt to keep it intact. 

“We miss you, you know.”

The words came suddenly, blurted like a long-held secret. “Hope and I.” She waved her hand uselessly. “Freya. Sometimes I think even Vincent misses you. At least misses the feeling of purpose, whether it was with or against you. New Orleans feels like it should but. . .that feels empty to me.” She laughed derisively, shrugging and taking another drink of whiskey. “Guess that says a lot about me, huh.”

He chuckled and turned his body slightly towards her. “Imagine then, what it would say about me.” He shook his head amusedly. “That city practically sings of my terror. I’m sure it is all too happy to have me gone.” She watched as sadness flickered across his shadowed features. 

“We’re not.” She took his hand again, diamonds swinging in her ears and pink silk dripping like a waterfall from her skin.

“We never will be.” 

____________

Her head had come to rest on his shoulder on the walk home, left hand in his right and the other wrapped around his forearm for support. They had drank, and talked, and drank some more, and she had told him all about Hope and watched him with a bit lip and a smile as he scrolled slowly though the photos on her phone, mouth open in awe as if he still couldn’t believe, twelve years later, that she was real. His daughter. 

The bar had closed and he had yet to hold her, kiss her, breathe her in like air as he so desperately wanted to do; instead their hands had lain joined on her thigh for hours, the pad of his thumb brushing a pattern on the skin where her dress fell away. It was all he could do not to take her there on the counter, whisper love into her hair and plead with her not to leave again. His pride was the only thing holding him back from such action; the thousand year old arrogance that had started wars, burned cities, and destroyed families- his included. If he were Elijah he would already have proposed with an heirloom diamond during a sunset in Paris. But Elijah he was not, and Elijah he would never be. 

He wasn’t sure when “they” had become a “them” at all. The five years that she was gone he ached for her as he never had for anything in the world; Marcel could not even taunt him with the thought of fresh blood, for it was only her that he craved. Even after those years, when she had turned into his arms outside of her house that night they escaped New Orleans and held him to her as if her heartbeat depended it, they had never spoken a word on the few nights they spent together on the run with Hope; crashing in cheap motels with one bedroom to avoid suspicion had turned out to be in their favor sexually, but the aftermath of silence tore him to pieces with annoyance and the agonizing insecurity that he was once again second best to his brother. 

She knew, as she walked in step with him, perfectly paced to their synced heartbeats down a cobblestone street, that she could easily tell him that it had always been him- in her dreams, in her mind even as she kissed Elijah, in every prayer she sent up at St. Anne’s and in the graveyard with the witches. But if he was going to hold out on the truth on her, then she could do the same. 

Elijah had been the “right” one. The “stable” one. Immaculately dressed and well-spoken, he was the better of the two, just as Stefan had been Damon’s better. But something drew her to Klaus the way he drew her now, a mix of curiosity, power, and familiarity. Something deep inside her told her that she had known him once, perhaps in another life. His soul whispered to her in a language as old as time itself, a soft caress of something she couldn’t quite put her finger on but knew was unique only to him.

Yes: she loved him. She had always loved him. She buried it beneath hurt and anger and hatred, wrestled with it for ten years before giving in, letting him fly her to London, then Paris, then Dubai and Beijing and Rio, and now here, spending a week with him in each city before going back to New Orleans with bruises healed seven times over and a gift and a letter for Hope. And maybe she loved him for that: his infinite and fierce devotion to giving her and Hope the world in all of the pieces that he could. Maybe it was for the way he had betrayed them all years ago to protect their daughter, knowing they would hate him but choosing his love for Hope over his insatiable hunger for acceptance. Maybe she loved him for the way he had defended her from the moment the Mikaelsons had welcomed her home, as if she had been part of his family for a thousand years and not a single day. Maybe it was the way he looked when he painted, the way he laughed when she dabbed her fingers into his palette and smeared the colors on his cheek. Maybe it was the way his laugh sounded through energetic jazz as he spun her in drunken circles, or the way he left beignets on her bed on the Mondays before he had had to leave with the Hollow fresh in his chest, or the way he kissed her softly goodbye on the temple and then left the terminals without turning around after their weeklong jaunts around new cities.

But really, she knew, it was for everything good and bad about him, every fight and murder and joyful dance in the New Orleans rain and every line crossed and empty wine bottle and drop of blood drawn, because she had learned that loving someone only half the time left her hopelessly, and eternally, 

empty.  
____________

“I miss you too.”

She looked up at him, finding his blue eyes easily in the firelight.

“More than I will ever be able to tell you both.” His tone was ripe with an intense sadness, and she kissed the tattoo on his chest lightly, listening to his heartbeat slow. “More than the sun misses the moon every day when it shines, little wolf.”

His smile was warm like the flames flickering nearby as he pulled her closer and breathed in her hair. This was the Klaus she loved most; the artist with a taste for adventure and fine wine and with a smile as bright as a thousand suns. Not the sociopath, not the jealous brother, not the villain, not even the all-powerful protector and king. Just him, a man who would have been happy in a small loft in Paris painting for art shows if only life had been kinder to him.

“I have never been a poet.” He propped his head up on his hand, staring down at her deeply. “But, little wolf, I believe I could write poetry about you.” She smiled softly as he captured her lips for the hundredth time that night. “Every-“ kiss “single-“ kiss “day-“ kiss “and I would never run out of words to describe you with.”

She laughed, shaking her head disbelievingly and then nuzzling his chest with her nose. She lived for these moments. Lying in his bed, wherever he was, whatever city he was currently inhabiting, immediately felt more like home than any other place in the world. Being with him felt like the pure definition of ethereal. She had found herself thinking more than once, as she drank her coffee spiked with bourbon in his studio as she watched New Orleans wake up, that he made eternity worth it.

“Write me a poem then,” she murmured sleepily into his chest. “And send it home with me, and I’ll frame it and look at it every day until you come back to us.” 

She felt his heartbeat quicken under her fingertips. “You know that I want nothing more than to come home to you.” He kissed her forehead with a feather touch. “To Hope. To be a family. But Hayley-“

“I’m working on finding a way.” She sat up with the sheet held to her chest, and his body followed her, a frown creasing between his eyebrows. “Just like I did when I had to bring all of you back. I’m not going to stop.” He smelled the tears on her before they fell, heard the catch in her breath as she struggled to push them down. She was beautiful even when she cried, a flush on her cheeks and her lips parted like a prayer. She might have been the most beautiful thing on earth.

“I’m tired. . .”she rubbed a hand over her face, sighing deeply as her mind sifted sluggishly through the words. “I’m tired of watching your life in pictures. I’m tired of phone calls and photographs, and so is she. We need you, Klaus.” She gripped his hand forcefully, flinching as she heard a bone crunch. He didn’t move- only watched her with an impossibly unreadable gaze as his finger healing with soft clicks. 

“You will have me.” He opened his arms and she turned exhaustedly into them, letting him pull her gently back to the mattress. “I promise.”

He closed his eyes against her forehead, shifting the sheet up carefully over her body and tucking it around her shoulder. “I will stop at nothing to come home to you, little wolf.”

He could have sworn he heard her whisper she loved him as she drifted into sleep.

________

He had decided, as he walked in the Italian sunrise towards the jewelry shop near his flat, that he was insane. 

Elijah he was not, and Elijah he never would be; he still stood by that statement even as his footsteps took him ironically closer to a future that seemed everything his brother had originally planned for the chocolate-haired woman fast asleep in his bed. He hadn’t even thought about a ring until he watched her sleep just hours earlier, angelic in the most literal of senses, a softness he hadn’t seen on her in thirteen years since she crowned herself Miss Mystic Falls while champagne-drunk in an orange dress that put even Caroline Forbes to shame. 

After that, the thought of a ring turned from an impossible and easily-buried sentiment into the only thing that mattered to him on this Monday morning in Siena.

He chose three diamonds set in twenty-four karat gold, a ring he was almost undeniably sure he remembered on the hand of an Italian duchess in the seventeenth century. Perhaps it would stay in his pocket for decades until he could muster up the courage to tell her the truth: that he had loved her since the moment Hope was conceived, and that everything after that night that did not end with her at his side at the end of every day had been a mistake. Maybe he would give it to her today with champagne for breakfast on the balcony and watch the diamonds try to match the sparkle in her eyes. Or, maybe he never would, and he would go to the grave waiting on his pride to melt like ice in his bourbon.

Which was, of course, impossible, because he never put ice in his bourbon to begin with.

He could smell the coffee already as he strolled home with a supremely Elijah-like spring in his step and his hands in his pockets, fingers wrapped carefully around the blue velvet box. For the first time in his life, he felt extremely normal, like coffee on cool Italian mornings outside his favorite cafe with a woman he loved enough to ask to share eternity with and their daughter across the table with pastry crumbs on her dress. 

He had never outright admitted to her that he loved her; he thought it unkind, when he was still lying to her about the reason he always left after her trips to see him.

It wasn’t that he didn’t want her to come back, of course not. If he never wanted to see her again he wouldn’t have invited her in the first place. He could have settled with her in London as easily as in Beijing as easily as here in Siena. It was that every time she left, every time he walked back into his flats with her scent in his sheets and an empty champagne glass and rumpled blanket where she had sat with her head in his lap in their last few hours together was too much for his soul to bear, and so within days the place would be emptied, packed, and shipped to a new city that didn’t hold the heartbreaking memory of her. 

It wasn’t that he didn’t want her to come back. It’s that he wanted her to stay.

She never did.

He had found himself close to saying the words several times: as she smiled into a Paris sunset or turned to him, curls flying, as she pointed at the fireworks over Rio. I love you clung to his lips like flower petals hung to their stems in a downpour, dancing between his kisses and writing itself over and over on her skin if it would only listen. There was no one he had met in this world, in his thousand years of life, that he thought deserved to hear the words more than her. 

I love you.

It ran through his head like water, endlessly fresh even in its ancient existence. He walked faster as the sun turned orange in the sky, fingers still clasped around the small box in his pocket, and the ghost of a satisfied smile playing lightly at the corners of his mouth. 

He wouldn’t give it to her today.

But next year, or next month, or in five years or ten decades or however long it took for them to find a way to make their family a family again, he would. 

Because Klaus Mikaelson had been chasing this kind of love for one thousand years. And he could wait just as long for her.


End file.
